Authors and Promotion and Sales - OH MY!!!

I wrote my first book in 2009 and my novel was published in 2012. Need I admit — I was a novice. I knew nothing about promotion. I set up several online blog tours and left everything else to my publisher. But my publisher was small and had a limited budget for marketing. Beyond that, though, they didn’t give me any guidance. I was adrift in the middle of an ocean of hundreds of thousands of authors trying to promote their books. My sales were abysmal. Depressing.

Unfortunately, the publisher closed shop this year.

Fortunately, I’m with another small publisher who is lending me a helping hand – Ravenswood Publishing, headed by Kitty Bullard. She does promotion for her authors but that is definitely not where promotion begins and ends. It must continue with YOU, the author.

And Kitty gave me many sites to use for my promotion. The important word here is “my” promotion. It’s what I, the author, have to use in order to promote my own book, to try to get the reader to buy it – to sell my work. Some authors don’t care about sales, though I’ve not met anyone like that yet. I write books to “share” with others. I want people to read them. I don’t write so that I can keep the book on my computer for posterity. I write because I want people to be “taken away” and experience a world I’ve created for them to share with me. I want them to buy my books.

Whatever your reasons for writing, IF you want to sell your books, you must promote them. So, here are a bunch of sites where you can promote your book – some cost next to nothing, some cost more than that, some are expensive – most are reasonably priced. And I’ve put them in no particular order. It doesn’t matter whether they’re in alphabetical order. What matters is that you look up each and every one of them to see if it offers you something that’s worth your time and/or money to use for promoting your book. Just copy and paste the links into Google and they will all come up and you can start your research.

Why am I writing this post? Because my sales are not abysmal as it was with my first book. And another KEY point. Don’t stop promoting. Gone are the days where you have a teeny-weeny window of time to promote your book and after that, fuggetaboutit. Nope. Not any more. You not only have time before your book is published, you have plenty of time after it’s published to continue promoting it. And sometimes you find a particular site that brought in sales for you. So you can go back to them and continue promotion “until the cows come home”. It doesn’t have to end.